Well, it is a Swedish train which is being run by SJ, Statens Järnvägar. This literally means The State Railroads, but the company was privatized a number of years ago. The numbers are just the type of the engine and the cars. And that kind of engine is pretty common (AFAIK) on the northern lines. So they will not help very much.

Well, if I didn't have reason to believe Nat & Kat would survive this leg, this would probably indicate to me that they survived. Of course, there have been examples of teams making quotes and being eliminated at the end of the leg.

Uppsala>Arlanda must be a popular run (cap below).I wonder if they were told to take a certain train #/line; I couldn't find a good shot of the info card andit might have occurred to some team to just drive through the "night" from Narvik.

On a different topic, production almost wasted a lot of money (save for N/V) with the piano task. It would have been easy, despite thecacophony, if you knew the tunes (I'm embarrassed to admit I only recognized two). I think the people who created and tested the task knew the music and didn't realize how hard it would be if someone was just hearing it for the first time.

I'm not so sure TPTB were aiming for an easy task. Most people these days, haven't trying learning an instrument or choir, so they are not at all familiar with reading sheet music. And I hadn't heard of two of them before, so my guess is the music task was designed to be the harder task, unless a team had a at least one member who had a really good ear for music.The film task was easier if you were patient and observant about the film being projected. A couple of the teams hit upon the words showing up on screen, and looking for those in the film strips the teams had to go through; but the unstated factor was how many of those strips were the correct film -- we weren't told.Clearly this was a dual "needle in a haystack" detour, devious and difficult, and one of the more challenging detours I think we've ever seen on TAR. It had to be driving the teams crazy unless they kept their cool from the time they arrived in St. Petersberg until they reached the pit stop.The roadblock wasn't a piece of cake, either. The Cyrillic alphabet would be difficult if you haven't been exposed to it (as some Cyrllic letters have quite different sounds that the Roman alphabet), and teams had to be observant about the signs and the instructions for the task. I loved the babushkas in this task, they were well coached about what sort of stupid things the Americans would do and the snark was unmistakable. (Reminded me of the Bakery babushka on an earlier visit to Russia) This, to me was a well designed leg (the 24-plus hours of travel after leaving the pit stop, having to use trains, planes, taxis along the way before they got to the first clue box in St.Petersburg). I'm one of the few who wasn't surprised that this was an NEL. I had suggested as much when we first learned there would be a second St. Petersburg leg, (as that has become the practice in the leg design in recent seasons when there are two legs in the same city or urban area. (Was the case in Ghana, right?) I do wonder if Nick and Vicki really how damned lucky they've been to avoid elimination. They've averaged 7th place in the season to date, and came in 7th this week with 7 teams left. The odds are against them (though Rebecca and Adam are proof that badly performing teams can make final three, not to mention that other team that was on the Race the last time they were in Russia proper.)

I think it is like the symbols task in Ghana where under the pressure nobody save Connor/Jonathan figured out that the decoder key was just around the corner, and here under the pressure nobody figured out that the better way to do it, even if you're not music inclined, is to focus on just one before moving on to the next one. Still, it was an awesome task!!! and I understand that with 50 other pianos playing at the same time it gets harder, but not impossible! You just need a different approach and focus.

I think the easiest approach (For me anyway) would be to take all the sheet music then listen to the three being played, one by one. That probably seems easier for me because I know how to read sheet music, but I can't believe that no teams thought it would be easier to take them on one at a time before Nick and Vicki completely Bald Snarked it.